Wednesday, October 18, 2017

"you are part of the problem"

Lindsey Adler pulls no punches as to why Weinstein and Cosby and Trump are a male problem, first and foremost:
"If you are a man who truly didn’t know—who has now heard something on this line from a woman you are close to and who is finally opening up with her story to you about a mutual friend, or family member, or colleague—ask yourself why it took so long. Ask why it took yet another run through the cycle for her to trust you. Ask yourself why the women you know haven’t shared the massive accumulation of information they have stored on their mental hard drives by their 20s if not before with the men who are good, who know better than to treat women as objects.
If you leave this issue to women, if you refuse to make your friends or yourself be better—whether by intervention or by consequence—you are part of the problem, no matter what you make of yourself. If you are closing yourself off from the information that has been out there for too long to be worth considering about gender, power, and violence, or the cyclical flows of personal anecdotes about them, you are not excused. It has been too long, too obvious, and presented too many ways for anyone to claim ignorance."
This is why "rape culture" is still such an effective term to describe what's going on these days.  Most men go through life never raping anybody (congratulations, I guess?).  All men do, to some extent, contribute actively or passively to constructing environments where women can be, in fact, raped, or at least harassed, cat-called, stared at, or made to feel creeped out.

Adler is pessimistic that things will change after Weinstein, but she's spitting fire here against the passive, enabling "not all men" perspective.

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